Horsley: Don't close the book on Barnes & Noble, Salem Abraham

This is an open letter to Salem Abraham. Sir, please don’t do this. We understand you’ve been in negotiations with Amarillo’s Barnes & Noble bookstore over the terms of their lease, set to expire in a few months.

You’re at loggerheads with the bookstore, not over the lease price, but over the lease term. You want 10 years; they want 7.

As a businessman, you are absolutely free to require Barnes & Noble to accept your 10-year lease if you want — and boot them out if they don’t agree to your terms. The bookstore has offered a 7-year lease, but that’s not good enough in your eyes.

So if things keep going the way they are going, the bookstore we bibliophiles waited so long for — the gold standard of bookstores — will sell down its merchandise and close up shop at the end of the year.

And for what — so you can have an empty building sitting at Soncy and Westgate Parkway instead one bustling with holiday shoppers?

If newspaper reports are true, you’re trying to make the property attractive to potential buyers. We fail to see how attractive an empty Barnes & Noble store will be. It’s not like the store could be easily converted into a McDonald’s, a Home Depot or another Tex-Mex restaurant.

It was designed as a Barnes & Noble, and even without the company logo on the facade, it will still be a Barnes & Noble building. Another business moving into that space will need to spend quite a lot of money to make it not look like what it is — a Barnes & Noble.

Maybe you’re wondering what business it is of mine to stick my nose into your business. Since you don’t live here, maybe you don’t realize how much that store means to us. It’s where we took our kids when they were small, to learn about books and begin a lifelong love of reading and learning.

It’s also where reading groups meet to discuss the latest novel and where young couples sometimes have date nights. We’ve stood in line to buy a book signed by the author, something that’s hard to do online. Quite a few regional authors had their first book signing there.

You might argue Amarillo has other bookstores. True — Hastings Books, Music, and Video started right here in our town and offers many of the services Barnes & Noble does. But to bibliophiles, a bookstore whose main focus is books is a more hospitable environment than one whose main focus is DVD and video game rentals and sales.

You might also argue that the end of big-box book retailers is already in sight, and eventually very few cities will have large bookstores as more and more consumers turn to digital methods of reading, so you’re merely hastening the inevitable. True again.

However, death is also inevitable, yet few of us wish to hasten that particular inevitability. Why not let us have a few more years to enjoy our big-box Barnes & Noble, and then we can all switch to digital everything and never have to leave the house?

I’ll offer you the following deal: Come to Amarillo and let me take you to Barnes & Noble, where you can browse the aisles and select a book you like and I’ll buy it for you. Then we’ll sit and enjoy a cup of whatever caffeinated drink you prefer — my treat again — as you peruse the first chapter of your book.

We’ll sit in the overstuffed chairs with the morning sun at our back, and sip and read a while.

Then, if you’re still adamant about the 10-year lease, I will accept the fate of thousands of other book lovers who will mourn the closing of our Barnes & Noble, the only one between Fort Worth and Denver, and not say another word about it.

David Horsley teaches English at West Texas A&M University and is a freelance writer. He can be reached at dhorsley@wtamu.edu.